


by my hand, he is made; unmade

by irog



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Inspired by Pygmalion and Galatea (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), M/M, don’t mind the other characters they’re very minor, don’t overthink the rating because nothing happens, enjoy, for now, i don’t know if anything here qualifies as fluff, nor do i know if anything qualifies as angst, plot devices if you will, poor darling, this is awfully short but i think that’s all we need, ushijima yearns, why does he like a stone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 08:02:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27347824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irog/pseuds/irog
Summary: ushijima is a sculptor; his creation comes to life.oikawa has been sentient awhile.
Relationships: Oikawa Tooru/Ushijima Wakatoshi
Comments: 15
Kudos: 136





	by my hand, he is made; unmade

**Author's Note:**

> for [weez](http://twitter.com/angelbones__), whose tweet made me Think.

An unfounded guilt makes Wakatoshi halt his actions. He watches his fingers—crusted with dots of dried clay, large and sure—how they twitch with a feeling he can’t bring himself to define.

 _This…_ he chastises himself as he had the day before, looking away with a pained expression, _is incorrect_.

He lets his hand fall away from scaling the expanse of his creation’s marble chest, opting to appraise it from some two feet away, where he can only use his eyes to see. Its texture taunts him, tells him, _There is work to be done. Smooth me, smooth me, smooth me._

And by Aphrodite, is he—it—beautiful.

Strewn across his workshop are other models and sculptures: some half-done, some momentarily abandoned in favor of concentrating his diligence onto a different slab of stone. Some of them—a product of Wakatoshi’s multidisciplinarity—were clay. Pots especially littered the area in abundance, hinting to Wakatoshi’s other profession as a potter.

He’d been taught, and then taught himself, but doesn’t know, still—eleven suns after the fact—how or where he could have thought to make a face like this one. Eleven suns later, it is all he finds himself thinking about.

The sculpture’s eyes have an almost warm brightness to them. Its cheekbones are prominent, lips thin; impossibly delicate. His hair, crafted meticulously, swooped like waves to one side and mussed up in other places so he looked as though he had run across town and thoroughly enjoyed the wind that came with it. His thin brows sat beautifully apart, untroubled.

And Wakatoshi knew that it was by his hand. He had labored night and day, fueled by restless energy he had not known the source of.

But it looked so alive—so alive that it was painful, and he knew of his own abilities but wished in every moment since its completion that it were crafted instead by the gods.

Wakatoshi dares a step forward and cups the face of his creation, thumb tracing over the arch below his brow; roving the apple of his cheek, hovering with want over smooth lips. He dares a look into its eyes and again, there is that guilt.

He feels as though the statue is staring.

He looks up to the ceiling of his haven, stretching what felt like miles above his head; dome covered in old paintings of the heavens. A window in the dome, glass that had lasted him ages of lightning and rain, tells Wakatoshi the true time. The sun has begun to set. Another day will have passed that he is subjected to marvelling at the beauty of the stone before him; at how ignorant it is of the way it makes his chest rumble.

Wakatoshi is besotted—pitifully so. Shame fills him, and he tears his gaze away from what he knows to be the most beautiful thing in the room.

“Sorry,” he whispers, half to himself and half to every inanimate object that has to witness him in such a state—fawning over that which cannot even receive his affections.

 _How pathetic,_ he thinks to himself and, as though confirming it he places a final caress over the arm of his unassuming magnum opus.

｡

The statue shivers. His body does not.

He prays to the god that has made him sentient, and all but growls.

“Release me,” he says. “Release me—I want him as he wants me.”

｡

Wakatoshi keeps him hidden in the back room when his colleagues come to the workshop to visit. Loathe as he is to conceal his beauty, he doesn’t know what he’ll do if they appear one day with an interested buyer in tow after being told of the figure’s exquisite nature.

And so he apologizes in low whispers as he wheels the statue into isolation. Today, he brings the sculpture of Hachiko with him for company; not knowing why but feeling as though he’ll need it, and his gut twists with displeasure at how he’s started treating them like dolls. It had never been—and never will be—his intention. And yet.

“Hey,” Daichi is saying much later, when the sun has just started to descend from its apex. “Where’s Hachiko?”

“Ah. I kept him,” Wakatoshi answers, heart just short of jumping out of his chest. “There are some details on Hachiko that I need to polish.” He tries a grin. “He has a reputation.”

Daichi looks amused for a moment before Bokuto cuts in, bouncing from behind Iwaizumi, a skilled blacksmith. His hair, unscholarly, betrays his excitement.

“Can we see?” he asks.

“No,” Wakatoshi replies firmly.

“He’s right,” Iwaizumi offers. “You know how Ushijima gets about his work.”

“Thank you, Iwaizumi.”

Wakatoshi makes the mistake of exchanging wary glances with Daichi. The blacksmith’s voice is suddenly far away, asking, “So he’s in the back, right!”

Wakatoshi’s blood runs cold.

✧

Moonlight.

It cascades through the window of the storage room in solemn beams; bringing with it a bitingly cold wind that grazes the edges of a pulled-back curtain. Wakatoshi’s hair stands on edge at the temperature, but he cannot bring himself to go home, nor leave the room to be shrouded in darkness, lest someone come to take his statue like a snivelling thief in the night. The afternoon had left him winded with worry; had gotten him to hassle his friends beyond his front door so he may confirm something for himself.

He had bolted to the very back of the workshop, nearly pulling the cloth from where it hung on the doorway, and almost crashed into his creation.

He regards it now with a concern that had not left him since then.

 _Looks fine to me,_ Iwaizumi’s voice echoes in his mind still; its chipper tone once he had returned to say something about Hachiko, beaming. None about this statue, in all its striking, poised glory, and it bothers him that there could be only one reason.

Wakatoshi stands from where he’s made himself a nest, unable to bear the few strides of distance, and frowns as he regards the stone—as if with life; as he wished to every god, to every star in the dim of his home. Where it cannot hear how he foolishly trembles, prayer and plea upon his lips. How _helpless,_ scantily chasing relief as desire pools in his gut, disgust for himself alongside it, deep within him.

He looks at this—not _his; not his_ —beauty, and feels his being cave.

A hand is once again on its cheek before he knows it; another rising to cup the gentle curve of its face, and as Wakatoshi holds it— _him—it_ —he asks, “Why did he not see you?”

Unknown to him, the statue begs, as he presses his forehead to it, and gazes into its eyes forlornly, _Do not be sad. Please. Please. I can do nothing for you like this._

“You couldn’t have gone anywhere, but—” Wakatoshi shuts his eyes, reconciling the facts but failing. “— _how?”_

 _The gods_ , the statue weeps. _The gods—Aphrodite—I don’t know. I don’t know. Please. I—_

“I love you,” Wakatoshi whispers to the darkness between them, strained. “I wish… no, I don’t know how I could not.”

The admission echoes against marble lips; bounces towards cracked stone walls. Finally acknowledged after ages of denial.

To desire a man he did not know, whose likeness he has carved into stone, Wakatoshi has thought in the days, the months, prior—is the most terrible fate. He curses his blessed hands, how they have created something so unattainable, yet known to him like his own profession.

A sharp inhale, as he is reminded ruefully of the dimples on its back, the curve of its spine. Every knob; every muscle in its shoulders. The plains of its clavicles that should host bruises, were he real. Its delicate nape; the rippling of its thighs, its smooth, ample derriere; its—

“I love you,” Wakatoshi croaks again; and again, he hates himself for it. He says, broken— _angry_ , “I wish the gods made you, not me.”

The warmth of his emotion climbs to his hands, unmoving on either side of the statue’s face. An insect has likely crawled onto his wrist, but he is uncaring of it, for now.

Steeling himself, Wakatoshi resolves to look at his creation, one last time.

But instead of marble white he is met with endless, captivating brown.

(In Olympus, there are cheers, and laughter.

Someone tells Aphrodite she’s a jerk; she answers with, _Well he didn’t say he loved him before today!)_

Swimming, like he used to on a warm day in the river—is how Wakatoshi feels. Except the water looks murky, and the currents possess a dangerous strength and he is drowning, pulled beneath the surface and gradually losing his breath.

His senses zero in on the grip on his wrists that have fractionally tightened.

It is its— _his_ —hands. Milky-white, deceptively solid, and soft.

Too soft.

 _“Oh…”_ Wakatoshi breathes, and he crumbles though his legs keep him upright. _“Oh…”_ And he is like a child that _gazes_.

He has had all the time; has made use of it. But there is no moment to waste, now, and his eyes search— _frantic_ —studying him again.

“Hi,” the statue, now a man, whispers. His breath is warm on his creator’s lips. His expression is kind.

He watches every possible emotion eclipse Wakatoshi’s face. Handsome horror and beautiful confusion and constrained, unsure relief. He watches his eyes flicker in the dark and maintain, through everything, his reluctant, unwavering love.

In his mind, Aphrodite is bidding him good-bye, and good-luck, and _remember_.

“Wakatoshi,” he says, trying out his voice. It sounds like honey on lyres. Like a river, flowing.

The sculptor staggers back, surprise painting his features. He wants to look to the floor in embarrassment, but he can’t, and the name escapes Wakatoshi before his mind is rid of mist.

“Tooru.”

The man smiles. “Is that what you have named me?”

Wakatoshi almost nods, but as he looks from a distance he sees things apart from Tooru’s face, in full color. He begins from the youthful swoop of his hair, brown like a glazed pot, down to the delicate crease in his forehead from his own, albeit subdued, shock. The elegant slopes of his face and the flutter of his eyelids that sends tingles down Wakatoshi’s clothed back. His nose, tinted with a faint blush only barely visible by the moon, and his cheeks, in the same state. His lips, parted slightly, revealing teeth Wakatoshi had not put there himself.

His appraisal travels down Tooru’s chin, to the sharp cut of his jaw. To his throat—the apple that sits there in the middle of a muscular neck that dips into toned shoulders. His chest, broad, and rising, falling. Tooru _breathes_ , Wakatoshi hammers again into his mind. _He is alive_.

He makes a decision.

“No,” he answers evenly. It sounds almost cold, and Tooru’s face crumples for a moment before Wakatoshi tacks on, gently, “That name has always belonged to you.”

Tooru lights up in a smile, toothy and… _dimpled?_

“Thank you, Wakatoshi,” he says happily, and this time Wakatoshi does turn his gaze to the floor, but not before his eyes pass over—

In two strides, he’s torn the curtain off where it hangs on the doorway to the back room, and wraps it around Tooru’s waist, heaving, and with a prominent blush on his face. At his loss for words, Tooru looks at him interestingly, and he turns away.

Tooru places a hand lightly over his where it’s settled at his hip, fisting a fabric. Without malice, he asks quietly, “Haven’t you seen me already?”

“I have,” Wakatoshi gulps, and Tooru’s hands move to cup his face, as he had done to him a while ago.

He knows, then, as he melts under that eager stare, that this is not his statue. That this is a man, yes; cut from stone—that the gods coaxed out of his hands and have made theirs, and which they have made a new person.

Tooru is beautiful, and Wakatoshi tells him so, without guilt now, nor the burdens of dappling in a filthy affection. His hand clenches at Tooru’s side and follows his movement as he steps from his low platform, revealing that he is not taller than Wakatoshi.

His heart thuds in his ears.

“Say it again,” Tooru says reverently, passing a thumb over Wakatoshi’s cheek; his brow. “Say it again, Wakatoshi—that you want me. Because I do want you.”

“I love you,” he answers, bringing his left hand to Tooru’s waist and massaging the muscles there. “I don’t want to break you.”

“I won’t,” Tooru says surely. “I’m strong, Wakatoshi.”

“That—” Wakatoshi smiles, fond, “that is in your name.”

Tooru grins at him then, and heat flares everywhere on Wakatoshi’s body. He stays still, and lets his right hand be pushed by Tooru’s as Tooru steps forth, letting the cloth fall away.

A searing kiss.

Soft, slow movements from Tooru’s mouth, warm and wet and unreal, make home on Wakatoshi’s lips. He pulls him close, tenderly, and revels in the ways they seem to fit. In the sensations even he hadn’t thought to pray for.

Against his mouth, and in between breaths, Tooru says, “It is.”

**Author's Note:**

> shivers because i don’t know if i wrote any of that well enough. i hope you at least enjoyed that...
> 
> i’m inactive at the moment on twitter but you’re free to yell anyway, i suppose.
> 
> thank you!


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